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I didn't know you couldn't do a low level format on newer drives... That seems strange to me, but now that I think of it I never did one on a newer machine. I have been playing around with it in class but only on older P3 dells. But I am going to look into it some more.

Basically you are warned not to, or you might trash your HDD if you use an inappropriate tool.

Wikipedia:

Low-level formatting (LLF) of hard disks

User instigated low-level formatting (LLF) of hard disks was common in the 1980s. Typically this involved setting up the MFM pattern on the disk, so that sectors of bytes could be successfully written to it. With the advent of RLL encoding, low-level formatting grew increasingly uncommon, and most modern hard disks are embedded systems, which are low-level formatted at the factory with the physical geometry dimensions and thus not subject to user intervention.

EDIT:

Please check this link. Whilst there are tools that might be described a "low level format" they actually are not in the traditional sense.

There is a utility built into Windows that will do this for you. Check out the Cipher utility. It writes over the chosen directory 3 times. You'll want to delete anything on the directory that you want to write over.

I'm the opposite. I'd trust a Windows app over something custom any day. All Cipher does is overwrite unused space on a hard drive. If you have an empty drive, it will write over the entire disk 3 times and with different characters each time. It's really that simple. lol Why would you need anything else? Many of those hard drive-manufacturer applications only write over the drive once with ones and zeros. Cipher's actual purpose is to be used as an encryption utility, so what better way than to use it to mask your unused hard drive space?

Anyway, don't knock it until you've tried it. It's free and works for all hard drives, rather than just a specific brand. I really doubt that one of those free apps will be able to retrieve anything useful from a drive that has been 'ciphered'.